


Do the Time Warp

by Venivincere



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison is a spaceship, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Pirate, Alternate Universe - Space, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, M/M, Space Pirate AU, Time Travel AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-24 07:54:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2573978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Venivincere/pseuds/Venivincere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Lyds, what are you doing?” Stiles sags against the door frame in the bridge bulkhead, scratching his head.</p><p>Lydia looks up, one hand on her headset, the other pointing one perfectly manicured finger at him that warns, ‘shut up if you know what’s good for you’. She pushes a few buttons and types something lightning fast, then whips the headset off. Her eyes are glittering.</p><p>Stiles sits up. He hasn’t seen this kind of zeal from her since he first invited her aboard to join his little pirate band. “What is it?”</p><p>“If we play it right?” says Lydia, licking her bottom lip, “The best payload of our lives.”</p><p>Stiles leans forward. “And that is…?”</p><p>“A time machine.”</p><p>(A.K.A The Sterek Space Pirate Time Travel AU fic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do the Time Warp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TW_FallHarvest Community](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=TW_FallHarvest+Community).



> So many awesome fics in this fandom and none of them a Space Pirate AU? Well. Mischief managed, with bonus Time Travel.
> 
> Many thanks to my betaes M and B. Any remaining errors are solely my own, as are any inadvertent time loops or incorrect references to the passage of time. Please forgive them.

::-------------------------------------::

_\--ack Wolf initiative has been wildly successful in civilian trials. The Commander is hopeful that military trials, scheduled to commence next week, will be equally as successful._

_And in other news, half a million visitors gathered in the capital today for the ten year anniversary of the tragedy that rocked the galactic government. In a subdued memorial service, Senator Laura Hale spoke about the loss of her family, and the leadership and legacy of her mother, the late Senator Talia Hale. She also spoke of future Hale initiatives. Notably absent was Commander Derek Hale, currently serving out his second tour of duty in the Galactic Navy. The service was attended by all the ruling families of the sector, including the Argent Family, long time political rivals of the Hales. Kate Argent, speculated to be the next head of the Argent family when Victoria Argent steps down as Sector Senator, had this to say of today's memorial servi--_

Stiles flops a hand down on the remote and turns off the tri-D before they can flash to the vid of her. Something about that woman creeps him out. Wolf in sheep's clothing kind of creepy. He'd rather be left with the image of Commander Derek Hale they threw up on the screen, owner of the sexiest glower this side of Antares. Mmmyeah. There's a tired stirring in his groin, and-- ow. Owowow ouch think of worms think of Antarean swamp rodents think of Babcia in a bathing suit -- oh, that's better. He's completely chafed from a week of having absolutely nothing better to do than masturbate while they hid out in a little dust cluster long enough for the Locale deputies to lose interest in them.

Ugh. Time for a distraction. He un-burrows himself from his bunk, quietly closes the door to his quarters on the Allison (because if he lets it slam one more time at this hour his crew will mutiny-so-help-them-God-Stiles-you-may-be-Captain-but-that-doesn’t-give-you-the-right-to-be-inconsiderate!), and wanders through his ship to the bridge.

He doesn't expect anyone to be up at -- he looks at his watch -- oh hell, 3:53 AM ship's time, but there is.

“Lyds, what are you doing?” He sags against the door frame in the bridge bulkhead, scratching his head.

Lydia looks up, one hand on her headset, the other pointing one perfectly manicured finger at him that warns, ‘shut up if you know what’s good for you’.

Stiles huffs and shuffles into the comm seat across the console from her. She pushes a few buttons and types something lightning fast, then whips the headset off. Her eyes are glittering.

Stiles sits up. He hasn’t seen this kind of zeal from her since he first invited her aboard to join his little pirate band. “What is it?”

“If we play it right?” says Lydia, licking her bottom lip, “The best payload of our lives.”

Stiles leans forward. “And that is…?”

“A time machine.”

Stiles shoots up off his chair and slaps a hand down on the klaxon. "All hands on deck!"

::-------------------------------------::

Scott’s first on the bridge with a hasty, “Hi Allison!”

“Hi Scott,” says Allison, in a far more pleasant tone of voice than she ever greets Stiles. He’s had the Allison longer than any other ship and she’s by far the best ship he’s owned, despite her predilection for human males who aren’t him and who are named Scott.

“You’re an inveterate flirt,” Stiles grumbles at her. He listens to her disembodied giggles as he watches Scott sink into the pilot’s seat and fiddle with the coffee cup he left there earlier. Stiles watches Scott work it all out on his face. Is the coffee still good? Maybe… _sniff_. Erica and Boyd stumble in while he’s taking a gulp and eye the only two chairs close together on the bridge. Where Stiles is sitting.

“Move it, Captain,” says Erica, dragging Boyd behind her by the hand. He’s wearing his lab coat like a bathrobe. Erica’s wearing sleep-wrinkled lingerie, leopard print slippers and her I’m Frowning On Purpose face. Stiles moves it.

“What’s going on?” Isaac shuffles in, barefoot, wearing honest to goodness pajamas with matching pants and bottoms. He looks around, then stretches out on the floor against the nav console. He looks like something out of an old-fashioned JC Penny catalog from the nineties. The _nineteen_ nineties.

Danny’s a moment behind. He’s got his “Did you kiss your tech support today?” mug with him. The scent of replicator dark roast wafts over to Stiles’s nose. Stiles glares at the remaining bite of buttered toast in Danny’s hand until Danny pops it in his mouth and licks the crumbs off his fingers. There’s a reason for the rule about no food on the bridge, and since Danny’s the one that griped about all the crumbs in the control consoles until Stiles made the rule, he ought to know better. Stiles gives him a token “that’s better” glare. Danny settles down next to Isaac, takes one last sip of coffee, then hands it over to him and grouches, “This better be good, Stilinski.”

There’s a grumble of agreement just as the tri-D flares to life in the air above the comms console. Jackson’s head appears. Stiles catches a glimpse of his opulent living room. He’s got one of the biggest apartments on Beacon Free Space Port. Right in the sweet spot at half G, with an earth view, to boot. Stiles spots the bright blue gem outside Jackson’s window. He allows himself a moment of longing, even as he’s saying, “Settle down!” and making pressy-down hands like his Babcia used to do when he got too rambunctious.

“Stilinski,” Jackson crackles from mid-air, “this isn’t kindergarten.”

“And yet I’m still the boss of you,” says Stiles, settling down into the captain’s chair. “Pipe down. All of you. Lydia, announce your findings.”

She rolls her chair out from behind Jackson’s disembodied head and takes a deep breath. “At oh-three-fifty one point seven ship’s time I hacked a subether transmission originating from the Cygnus arm, near galactic edge. Some outfit’s just pirated a military transport.”

There’s a long beat of silence while everybody looks at everybody else. Scott’s not, though. He’s staring right at Stiles.

“Stiles…” says Scott, shooting a hesitant look around at the others. “I thought we agreed about this. We don’t traffic in arms. Or people. What’s up?”

Lydia glares at him, because no one who’s anyone states the obvious and everyone on Stiles’s ship is intimately aware of where the lines are drawn. They may be pirates, but Captain Stiles runs a tight ship. “They’ve got a time machine. That’s what.”

“What?!”

The bridge is instant chaos. Stiles lets it go on for ten whole seconds then raises one hand. The bridge falls silent. “Taking your questions in order of importance: yes, we are going after it. Yes, we will get there in time. Probably. Danny finished the installation of the new neutron potentiator drive just after dinner yesterday and we can be at galactic edge in 13 hours.”

The crew whistles; that’s four times as fast as any standard commercial drive.

“We will not be registering a flight plan because, yes, we are going _through_ galactic core, not _over_ , and yes, Dr. Vernon Milton Boyd IV, it _is_ going to be safe because we are only cutting the shallowest of chords through the very edgiest edge of the Long Bar, not blazing to our deaths in the heart of a super massive black hole smack dab in the middle of galactic center. Really, we're barely even grazing the edge. Just clipping the grass. Daisy picking.”

Boyd sighs and slumps back down in his chair, the picture of disgust.

“Okay, fine, maybe it is a little dangerous. But, time machine! _Time. Machine._ ” says Stiles. _Says_ , not whines.

“Uh… I actually did pick up on that,” says Boyd. “But I’m still gonna insist everyone wears thermoluminescent dosimeters at all times. Front and center. At the first sign of troub—”

“At the first sign of trouble we’ll skedaddle and recalculate our interception trajectory from a safer spot,” says Stiles. “Promise. But it will take longer. Already, who knows where they could end up in 13 hours? That’s almost enough time to get anywhere good, i.e. someplace that can front a time machine. And that’s assuming they have a neutron potentiator drive, like we do, which isn’t likely.”

“Unless they want it for their own nefarious purposes,” says Jackson. “If I had a time machine…”

“If you had a time machine I’d fear for the universe. Stop sneering at me, pirate wanna-be.”

“Fine, whatever. I’m outta here. Call me back when you decide what you want me to do with it.” Jackson reaches for the off button on his side of the galaxy.

“Wait!” says Stiles. “Jackson, I apologize. I hope you’re recording because that’s the last time I’m saying that tonight.” _Or possibly ever_. Stiles sniffs. “We will need you, but not to fence the time machine. We’re going to use the time machine to bring in hand picked payloads. Who knows what that will mean? Just get ready to play a lot of golf and open a lot of fat wallets.”

Jackson’s getting antsy. “How often are you planning to haul in?”

“You’ll probably get about three payloads a week.”

The noise level goes from 0 – 10 with various objections, complaints, general disgust, and one very loud wolf whistle. The bridge echoes with it. Stiles leans over to the far edge of the Captain’s console and flicks the overhead lights on and off a few times.

“Again, in order of importance! First, before we do anything, we will take steps to make a reasonable schedule. Allison, your request is duly noted and I promise that standard maintenance will be worked into the schedule.”

“Don’t worry, baby. We’ll take good care of you,” Scott croons.

“Thank you, Scott!” says Allison.

Stiles, along with everyone else, glares at Scott.

“What? Allison is our most important asset!”

“Stop flirting with my ship, Scotty.” Stiles glares at him. “Continuing on! We will all get our beauty rest,” Stiles says, glaring at Erica and hoping with all his superpowers that that appeases Lydia too, “and we will limit ourselves to a healthy work load and not work ourselves to death.” He shifts his glare over to Boyd. “Jackson, hire staff if you need it. You have contacts; vet them. Just run them by me before you hire. And yes, I will get you as much information ahead of the take as I can.”

He looks at Isaac. “You’re going to have to work out munitions with Allison. How much we have left, how much you think we’re going to need. Order in as many rescue pods as we have storage for. Standard vaporization procedures, so make sure you have what you need for ionization. Order weaponry, and for the love of God, order double parts for everything so Danny doesn’t get upset and remove his dimples from our presence.”

Danny snorts, but he’s grinning, too, so that’s a win.

“OK! Any more immediate questions?” Everyone’s looking quiet and undercaffeinated. “Aaand crickets. You guys must still be sleepy. Everyone in bed! We’ll convene again in 8 hours for lunch and then plan the raid.”

::-------------------------------------::

Stiles doesn’t do well with blood. He raises his head and looks down his arm. There’s an _awful lot_ of blood. His head swims. He clenches his teeth and tries for tough. “Boyd, hurry. This is not Sewing Circle at the Beacon Free Greater Tabernacle of God.”

Boyd snorts. “Your sliced arm does not a quilting square make, Stilinski. How about I keep taking my time so you don’t bleed all over Allison and contaminate everything.”

Ooh, last names. And Boyd isn’t smiling. Judging from the amount of blood he’s lost and the fact that Stiles thinks he saw bone somewhere in the mess that is his arm before he slapped his transporter button and passed out, he decides not to say anything more about that. He lays his head back down on the contour pillow and stares at the sick bay ceiling. “One lifeboat got away. We have to go after it before it comes back with reinforcements. Scott! Scotty! Allison, get Scott for me. Please.”

“Stiles, I’m right here,” Scott grumbles.

Stiles turns his head and there’s Scott, on the cot next to him. Groggy, with a big, fat bandage around his head. “Please tell me we went after that lifeboat.”

Scott winces. “Sorry, Captain.”

“Aww, crap. Allison?”

“Sorry, Captain. I moved us, but not far. We’re hiding in a cave on a small asteroid about 10 kilometers away from the raid. I pulsed the neutron potentiator drive for point oh oh five milliseconds to get here, so there’s no exhaust to follow. I doubt we’ll be found.”

“You’re a silicone miracle, Allison. But why are we still in the vicinity? Why haven’t we skipped the locale altogether?” Stiles asks, but just then Boyd hits a nerve and Stiles _whimpers_ , damnit, and passes out.

When he wakes again, his first thought is, _this isn’t so much fun anymore._

Eventually, he manages to get an eye open, only to discover that Lydia is uncomfortably close to his face. Boyd is nowhere to be seen. Also, he feels like a lead bar, all heavy and grey, weighing down the sick bay cot.

“That’s enough lounging about, Captain. We need you.”

Because it’s Lydia speaking, Stiles makes a Herculean effort to obey. He takes a deep breath and manages to lever up the tardy eyelid.

“That’s better. We’ve inadvertently taken a prisoner.”

“Fffhhhhhk.” Crap. Vocal cords won’t engage. He needs water. Or possibly a bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Yep. That’s what we’re all thinking. Allison is squawking up Galactic abduction laws chapter and verse and refuses to take us out of the vicinity until we get it straightened out. She’s afraid that if we get caught, the military will hold a tribunal and punish her by removing her AI module from the ship and forcing her to work on a crappy prison transport until her microchips decay.”

Stiles huffs out another breath and manages to make it sound as frustrated as he feels. He makes grabby hands at the glass of water beside the bed.

“Yep,” she says, handing over the glass. She even helps him get the straw in his mouth and puts the cup back on the table when he’s done sucking down the entire cup. “Scott’s talking to her, but she’s pretty upset. I’m not sure it’ll be enough to calm her down and persuade her to at least move us out of this sector.”

Yeah, Stiles can imagine. Allison must be panicking; they really are in between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t _go_ anywhere, it’s not technically an abduction. But if they _don’t_ go anywhere, they’re sitting ducks if the ship they robbed decides to come and rob back their stolen booty. Or if the military sends an avenging squadron. Stiles is more worried about the pirates than the military, however. Whoever they were had the power to vaporize the military vessel when they were done robbing it. And they saw no sign of rescue pods.

Stiles gulps.

Fear isn’t going to get them anywhere, though. He manages to focus his eyes on Lydia. “So do we know who the prisoner is?” he asks, and wow, does he sound croaky.

Lydia bites her lip and nods. There’s a little furrow forming between her eyebrows. Stiles deflates; this can’t be good.

She points behind her off to the side. “He’s unconscious. We found him stuffed in a shipping crate. I don’t think he put himself in there; it was nailed shut from the outside. We’ve turned on the quarantine field, so he’s not going anywhere.”

Stiles raises his head up and peers across sick bay to the quarantine area. And holy galactic mother. “ _Derek Hale?_ ” he whispers.

“Yep.”

::-------------------------------------::

“We’re screwed. You know that, right?”

Stiles is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main cargo transport bay sorting through a bunch of property stickers. Couldn’t the military have labeled their shit before they sent it into the field? He adds his findings to the manifest he’s mocking up for Jackson. 

He grunts as his arm twinges again. He’s tired and grumpy, and his arm hurts where Boyd put in all the stitches. He’s getting too old for this shit and doesn’t think he can or wants to take much more of it. Nobody ever talks about this aspect of being a pirate. Oh, no. It’s all glamor and money and the kickiest-ass night clubs in the galaxy. There’s nothing about avoiding calling your dad because you feel guilty all the time. Or not sleeping well because you’re constantly worrying your last job’s going to catch up with you. Sometimes he wonders if a clean slate might not be the best thing.

“I don’t know. I think I’ve almost got Allison persuaded to at least fly into the Perseus Transit and go hide in the dust. I mean, it’s not like we’re changing sectors, or anything,” he says, raising his voice for that last part.

“We’ve gone over this before, Scott! GPC regulations state the following:” says Allison, “‘A person shall not maliciously, forcibly, or fraudulently lead, take, carry away, decoy, or entice away, individual(s) with the intent to detain or limit the personal freedom of the individual. A person who violates this section is guilty of a felony, punishable by—’”

“—Imprisonment blah blah blah, yeah, but does the Galactic Penal Code even apply here, Allison?” says Stiles, an idea taking root in his wily pirate mind. “I mean, since we weren’t the ones to pirate the military transport in the first place. We pirated the pirates. Couldn’t we spin this as a rescue?"

“Hmm,” says Allison. “Do you think we could get away with it?”

“Uh… I do,” says Stiles. “It’s not like we want to hold him, anyway. We’d have no reason to. And maybe we can spin some good press out of this for ourselves. You know, ‘Independent Teamster and Wrecker Rescues Sole Surviving Naval Hero and Senator’s Brother Derek Hale’. It might even allay my father’s suspicions about what I do all day. Heck, we might even get some legitimate jobs from press like that!”

Scott wrinkles his nose. “Those don’t pay as well.”

“Maybe not, but I know you’d give up almost anything to be able to look your mom in the eye when she asks what you’ve been up to, same as me and my dad. So let’s do it. Allison, _get us out of here_.”

“Aye aye, Captain!”

::-------------------------------------::

“He sleeps like the dead.”

“He’s recovering from dehydration and whatever they drugged him with to get him in that box. It’s only been about sixteen hours since we found him. The majority of it should work its way out of his system in the next eight hours or so.”

“Ooh. In that case, close up shop, Dr. Boyd. You have a private patient who’s been waiting _forever_ to see you.”

There’s some rustling, and the slide of cotton twill on upholstery. “Erica, I really don’t think now’s the time—”

“And neither do I,” croaks a voice.

“Damn it! He’s waking up.” Another rustling, and _zzzzziipp_.

“Call Stiles.”

“Yes, doctor.”

Erica reaches for the comm panel but Stiles beats her to it from the bridge, where he’s watching the quarantined area on screen. He flips on the mic. “What a shame,” he says, “I was looking forward to the show.”

“Ugh! _Captain!_ ”

“How can you possibly think I wouldn’t be watching our guest, Erica? Anyway, all prurient interest aside, will one of you please bring him to the bridge?”

“Uh, Captain, I need a moment to examine our guest before you interrogate him,” says Boyd, just as Hale’s arm reaches out from behind Boyd and moves him out of his line of sight.

“Where am I and who are you?” asks Hale, staring directly at the screen cam. Stiles flips on the cam on his end so Derek can see him on the sick bay screen.

“Commander Hale, My name is Captain Zdzisław Stilinski of the GCF Allison. We’re an independent teamster and wrecker out of Beacon Free Space Port in the Sagittarius sector. We… uh, we rescued you. Look, you’ve been unconscious since we picked you up about 18 hours ago. Why don’t you let Dr. Boyd look you over? Then he’ll bring you up and we’ll get you something to eat while we talk. Sound good?”

Hale stares at Stiles long enough to make him antsy. Stiles holds himself as still as possible in the Captain’s chair and tries to maintain an accommodating and casually authoritative air. Which means he tries very hard to keep his knee from bouncing while he waits for Hale to say something. Anything. Or maybe anything but what he finally does say.

“Stilinski? As in, _Sheriff_ Stilinski?”

Stiles grimaces in what he hopes is a close approximation to a sincere smile. “My dad,” he says. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

Stiles cuts the mic and cam but continues to watch Boyd on the screen as he removes Hale’s IV and starts a series of physical diagnostics. Stiles turns up the gain but Hale is quiet, so Stiles can’t really hear what’s going on. He appears to be cooperative, though, even if his eyebrows look like they’re ready to attack. Stiles bites down on the urge to open the mic back up and start questioning Hale right away. He jumps up out of his chair and rubs his palms down his quads, smoothing his jump suit. He saunters over to the replicator. “Bronx egg cream. Chocolate. Extra salty pretzel, please.”

“That’s what I love about you, Stiles. You’re so polite,” says Allison.

“Can the sarcasm,” says Stiles, irritated at being made to wait. Even if it is in their best interest to make sure Hale is in good shape. He stirs his pretzel around and then takes a huge chocolate soaked bite.

“I’m completely serious, Captain. You’re the sweetest salty dog in the heavens.”

“Dude.” Stiles rolls his eyes. “Seriously? What do you want? You must want something.”

“What, can’t I give my favorite Captain a compliment?”

“Hrm. Lately, any time Scott’s in the room I am decidedly a third wheel. And also, this egg cream is amazing. It’s like you read my mind and replicated the perfect salty pretzel for me, so no. No, you can’t just give me a compliment and expect me to take it at face value. Especially not when I’m feeling irritated and worried, because that makes me suspicious of everyone’s motives, even my favorite ship’s. What do you want?”

Allison huffs a sigh. “Can Scott and I borrow the shuttle next Saturday when we get back to Beacon Free? He wants to take me on a date.”

“He wha—?” Stiles staggers back and sits down on the gunner array. And dear God, he hopes Erica turned it off last time she used it. Not that there’s anything out here to hit. Just a bare smattering of space dust. “Allison… he is aware that you’re my _ship_ , right? Are you aware? I mean, I’m all for sharing. Despite my bitching and the obvious impracticalities, what with you being tin foil and circuit boards and him being slightly more organic, I’m not really mad about it. Just jealous, because Scotty’s found someone and I haven’t. And worried, because I think you guys might be setting yourselves up for failure.” Stiles sighs. He likes to think he does a better job managing than anyone else who has their preconceived notions tossed in a blanket. Still, he’s not sure that what he just said makes sense. But maybe it does, because his feelings, prejudices and preconceived notions of how the world works are in free-fall, so it’s not surprising that his thoughts are, too.

“I know. Believe me, I’m aware of the difficulties,” she says. And Stiles believes her; she’s obviously bitter about it. “But…. Did he ever tell you what he did the first day we met?”

“No,” Stiles perks up.

“You’d just left the ship after giving me orders to calculate the ballistics for the job in that little star cluster in the Orion Spur. I couldn’t connect with one of my processing domains. One of the linkages was damaged during my installation and Danny went down to Beacon Free to get another one. I let Scott know I wouldn’t be able to do the calculations until Danny got back. So you know what Scott did? He said, ‘no problem!’ and lent me the linkage out of his tablet so I could get my work done on time.

“He just – I mean, he’s nice. He talks to me, and not just when he needs something. He cares about my feelings. Every ship I’ve ever governed, no one’s talked to me. Maybe they were used to the old AIs that didn’t have a Personality Array, or something. I mean, no one was really rude, but no one engaged, you know? Yours is the first ship I’ve worked where I actually felt like a part of the crew. I – well, I relish that.”

Stiles swallows around a lump in his throat and looks around the bridge. Everything’s bright and shiny, all polished, fresh vacuum marks in the carpeting. Allison takes care of the whole ship better than any ship AI he’s ever had, and she’s never complained or asked for anything. Stiles takes back every grumpy thought he’s had about her in the last month.

“Allison, Scott’s my best bud. We’ve been friends since Beacon Free Sandbox Saturdays when we were four, and we’ll be friends when we pull our last job and steal the Celestial Shores Assisted Living PermaCruise so we can retire. So I hope you won’t mind when we install a Geriatrics Pack to your Sick Bay Array in about 60 years, ’cause you’re going to need it.”

“Oh, Stiles!” Allison sounds, for all the world, as if she’s about to cry. Shit. “So does this mean we can borrow the shuttle?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Stiles grouses. And since no one’s around and Allison won’t tell, he lets himself get a little misty. “Sure.” He sniffs big and wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Can I please have another soda? Exactly like the last one.”

“Yeah,” she says, completely fond. “Sure thing.”

Stiles shoves the wreckage of his cup in the recycler and takes his fresh soda back to the Captain’s chair. And yeah, he’s breaking his own rule, but Danny can suck it. Stiles is captain of this pirate ship. He can break his own rules once in awhile.

He glances at the screen as he sucks chocolaty goodness off his fresh pretzel. Boyd’s got Hale sticking his arms straight out in front of him while Boyd presses down on them. Stiles flips on the mic. “Boyd, you done soon?”

“Another couple minutes, Cap’n.”

Stiles switches off and leaves Boyd to it. “Allison!”

“Yes Captain?”

“Private line to Scott, on screen. And I mean private. No listening in.”

“Yessir!”

Stiles smiles. She hasn’t sounded this perky in weeks.

“Connected!”

“Stiles, what’s up?” says Scott, looking up from the crate he and Isaac are repacking.

“Look up Allison’s manufacture date and get her on the birthday roster. Priority one. And enjoy your date Saturday, buddy.”

Scott’s whole face lights up and Stiles feels like 15 percent less of an asshole.

Which ends up being a good thing because twenty minutes later when he and Derek Hale are sitting down to burgers and curly fries in the conference lounge off the bridge, he’s got 15 percent more composure in the face of the sourest, grumpiest, son of a ruling family he's ever met.

::-------------------------------------::

Stiles knows how to do polite. He’d suck as a pirate captain if he didn’t. So the formalities – call me Stiles, thanks Derek, would you like a soda Allison does the best Bronx egg cream, it’s breakfast time on the ship but you simply must get the curly fries – breeze right by and they’re settled in the cushy armchairs at the table in the lounge off the bridge within two minutes.

“So how do you know my dad?” says Stiles, around a mouthful of hot, crispy potato curls. He sucks in a breath and takes a pull of his soda. Plenty of time to get to the questions Stiles really wants answered until after he feels him out a bit.

Derek finishes swallowing a large gulp of his soda and clears his throat. “He was a deputy on the case when my grandmother was killed. He found me and Laura in port. Took us down to the station and told us what happened.”

“Shit. I’m sorry,” says Stiles, and he means it. Of course that’s how Derek knows his dad. Stiles vaguely remembers his dad talking about the case several years ago. He should have remembered.

Derek exhales once, heavy, through his nose. “It’s okay. He was – kind. How’s he doing these days?”

“He’s doing well, thank you. Sheriff now,” says Stiles, unable to keep a small note of pride out of his voice. “But you know that.”

“I supported his election,” says Hale. “Mom made me do a tri-D spot. That was right before I left for my first tour of duty.”

Stiles’s curly fries drop out of his hand. “Seriously? I never saw it!” Probably because he was running around Beacon Free getting into trouble with Scott. Come to think of it, he never had time for tri-D when he was a kid. “That’s cool.”

Derek smiles, and holy galactic mother that should be illegal. He smiles back and tries to push his dick down without looking like he’s pushing his dick down. At least the chafing’s gone. He takes a long look out the observation window in front of the sofa.

“So, I hate to mix business with pleasure, but we’re going to reach Beacon Free in about 16 hours so we should probably exchange information.”

The smile instantly falls off Derek’s face. He drops his burger back down on his plate. “Stiles, I can’t go to Beacon right now. I have a mission to complete. I need to get back to my ship!”

“Derek, we can’t take you back th—”

Derek jumps to his feet and looms over Stiles. Stiles slips out of his chair and backs away, trying to get some distance between them. His back hits the bulkhead just as Derek’s fists the lapels of his jumpsuit. “Yes you can, and you will, or I will have you charged with treason!”

“Whoa there! Calm down. Or do I need to have Allison sound the alarm?”

Derek straightens Stiles’s lapels and backs off a little.

“Yeah, that’s right, buddy. My ship, my rules.” In a fit of insanity Stiles reaches out and straightens Derek’s lapels, too. His heart is beating out of his chest and he hopes it isn’t as noticeable as it feels as he pushes past Derek. Who fakes a lunge at Stiles. Asshole. Stiles swallows his heart and sits back down at the table. He eyes his curly fries and feels momentarily sick to his stomach.

“Look, it’s not that we wouldn’t take you back,” he explains. “It’s just that we can’t. There’s – I’m sorry, Derek, but there’s nothing left to go back _to_.”

Stiles doesn’t imagine the completely bereft and hopeless look on Derek’s face. He feels an answering pang of grief in his gut. “I’m so sorry.”

It’s a long minute of swallowing and fist clenching before Derek regains his composure. “How do I know you’re telling the truth,” he says, not meeting Stiles’s eyes.

Oh, well. Stiles may play fast and loose with the truth and have more than casual experience being an asshole, but he isn’t _mean_. At least, he doesn’t think he is. He hasn’t got a good reason to lie to Derek, and even if he did he’d think twice. Derek’s obviously shaken up about it.

“I wouldn’t lie. Not about this,” he says. “And anyway, you know my dad. There’s sheriff trouble, and then there’s _dad trouble_ , and believe you me, I know which one is worse.”

That earns a snort out of Derek. “Fine. Then what happened?”

“We intercepted a transmission that someone planned to pirate your ship. We were in the area,” a little white lie; Derek doesn’t need to know they have a neutron potentiator drive, seeing as they pirated it from a brand new, class A supermerchant vessel, “and decided to see if we could assist with rescue and salvage.” Which is mostly true, he thinks. He always puts the crew of ships he pirates in rescue pods before he salvages or vaporizes their vessels. He’s a thief, not a murderer. And the ship’s registered business _does_ include salvage. They’ve run plenty of legal, legitimate missions.

“When we got to the scene, uh, something had gone wrong on the pirate vessel.” Technically, it was because Erica had shot out their positron emission ports as soon as they got within range. “It was dead in space near the vaporized remains of your transport. Well, we assume it was the vaporized remains of your transport. The ion signatures—”

“I see,” says Derek, raising his hand up. He puts it down when Stiles doesn’t continue. “In that case, I still need to go back. But I’ll hire you. We need to make sure we get every scrap of cargo off that pirate ship and then have the remains hauled in for examination by the navy. It’s vitally important that we get there before it’s discovered. They need to identify the culprits and go after them. How far away from the last known position of my transport vessel is the wreckage?” Derek rises to his feet and pats his pockets. “And do you have a tablet I could borrow?”

“Uh…”

“Look, there isn’t time to talk about this now. I’ll pay you double, if I need to. We can talk on the way.”

“Look, Derek…” Crap. No getting out of it now. Every last bit of cargo from the military vessel sat inventoried and crated in his hold, along with the salvaged pirate vessel. He’d had to make the trip to galactic edge legitimate somehow, now, hadn’t he? “We… uh. We have everything with us. Here. In the hold.”

Derek scowls at him. “What?”

Stiles looks him steadily in the eye and gulps. “Your cargo is in our hold. Along with the salvaged pirate ship.”

Derek drops back down bonelessly into his chair and his mouth falls open. “No one hired you.”

“No.”

“And you just happened to intercept a transmission.”

“Uh… yeah.”

“That was so well coded that even the listening post on my _military vessel_ did not pick it up.”

“…Yeah?”

Derek ugly-frowns and Stiles’s stomach quakes. “You’re a _pirate!_ ”

So much for keeping it a secret. Stiles rests his chin in his hand and sighs. “Yeah.”

::-------------------------------------::

“Look. You can take everything else back with you,” says Stiles, several hours later. “But not the time machine.” They’ve reconvened in the lounge off the bridge after Stiles released Derek to go work off some steam. They have an excellent gym in the Allison; Scott, Danny and Isaac insisted. And it wasn’t as if Allison was about to let Derek get away with anything. The second he’d left the lounge to ‘stretch his legs’ Stiles had put her on sitter duty. “Baby gates and white gloves, Allison. Be your natural super-awesome friendly self, but no off-ship communications, no access to restricted areas or the cargo hold, crash-type isolation field if he makes any sabotage attempts. No transporter privileges. You know. Standard prisoner procedures. But do feed him well and make sure he stays hydrated or Boyd’ll have my ass. And keep me informed of his activities as you go along.”

“You got it, Captain.”

Derek had found his way to the guest quarters, settled in as much as he could with nothing to show for himself aside from his swank black leather military jumpsuit, and then found the gym. He’d spent most of his time in there, and Stiles had quickly realized that watching him wasn’t going to do him any good at all, seeing as how Derek, without any proper exercise clothing, had decided to perform his calisthenics bare-naked nude.

Stiles is willing to let it all go because Derek’s looking far more relaxed and reasonable, now.

“The problem with that, aside from the fact that _it isn’t yours_ , is that it’s mission critical.” Derek’s sprawled out on the sofa across from Stiles. The tri-D is on GNN but Stiles has it muted. There’s something about the World Series flying past on the ticker but Stiles isn’t going to let himself get distracted. Because, as he was careful to stress before this shit show hit the fan, _time machine._

“It sure is. Critical to my crew and me amassing our fortunes. Look, we aren’t opposed to giving it back. We just need to borrow it first for a little while.”

Derek looks murderous. But he doesn’t say anything for several minutes.

“Look,” says Derek, eventually, sitting up. He faces Stiles with his elbows on his knees. “There’s more going on with this. What do you know about the Black Wolf initiative?”

Ooh, politics. Something Stiles actively avoids unless it directly affects him. Which, usually, it doesn’t. He’s just one tiny pirate in a very large galaxy. “Uh… not much? Just that it was a military-grade time machine. That part was all over the news.”

Derek raises an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed. “The press and public know Black Wolf as the Hale family time machine initiative. There was huge public controversy surrounding the initiative at first, but gradually public support grew for a defense application not just in our sector but galaxy wide. The pundits speculate that success of the initiative will catapult my sister into the running for Galactic President.”

“Wow!” Stiles whistles. “I had no idea.” And while he’s not particularly politically inclined, he is, by nature an excellent researcher and strategist and can think very well on his feet. “I’m guessing this means the Hale family’s getting a lot of pushback from the Argent family?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Derek says. He takes a deep breath and lets it out, narrowing his eyes and examining Stiles. He gives a little nod. “I’m going to tell you something. I haven’t told this to anyone before so if it gets out, I will rip your throat out with my teeth.”

“Because that’s always an effective deterrent,” says Stiles, because speaking before thinking when threats of bodily harm are on the line is probably one of his superpowers. He bites his tongue and tries not to think of Derek’s mouth on his neck while Derek glares at him.

“Just… shut up and listen,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“Fine.” Stiles gives him a flat stare.

“Ten years ago, our families weren’t such strong rivals,” Derek starts. “We worked together on a few minor initiatives that were well received in the Sectoral Senate, though we remained opposed on many major initiatives. When I was still in high school, we had to attend some party or other with several other ruling families. The Argents were there, of course. It was a formal dinner and dance sort of thing. We were encouraged to mingle and get to know people close to our ages in the other families. You know. Network.”

Derek settles back into the corner of the couch and puts his feet up on the coffee table. He stares out the viewport at the stars drifting by and doesn’t meet Stiles’s eyes. “Kate Argent approached me and asked me to dance.”

Stiles has an idea where this might be going but he bites the inside of his lip and says nothing.

“She was really… _charismatic_. And I’d never even dated before. No opportunity. She really seemed to like me. After that night, we took every opportunity we could to secretly meet. Before too long we were secretly engaged. We were going to marry and unite our ruling families. We spent all our time having sex and planning the initiatives we would introduce together. I thought it was perfect, or so I thought.

“The night our houseship exploded and my family was killed, I was with Laura on Beacon exploring all those seedy little shops down in Hub D by the commercial hangars. Laura wanted to hang out in one of the dive bars down there and go dancing. She didn’t know I’d planned to sneak away and visit Kate. I waited at our meeting place for over an hour but she never showed up that night. I didn’t think too much of it until your dad found me and Laura on the dance floor in the Redwood Tap Room. After that night, Kate didn’t contact me for a month and a half. When she finally did, it was to tell me that her father found out about us that that she wasn’t allowed to see me again. I never questioned it at the time.”

“Oh, Derek.” Stiles’s stomach roiled.

“I didn’t make the connection for several months. Not until we had occasion to meet again at a public event. She was on the arm of another man closer to her own age. The son of a senator from Vela South. Her eyes met mine and for the smallest moment before she caught herself she looked so contemptuous….”

Before Stiles even knows what he’s about, he’s around the coffee table and settling in next to Derek. He lays a hand on his knee and says, “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” says Derek. He doesn’t look up. Stiles takes his hand off Derek’s knee and settles back on the couch beside him, quiet, and lets Derek compose himself.

“For the last ten years I’ve been looking for proof that she was behind the houseship explosion,” continues Derek. “The investigator said it was an accident, that there was a mechanical failure in the propulsion system that caused it. But the propulsion system had been inspected two months prior and found to be in top working order. It didn’t make sense, unless it was sabotaged. But anyone sabotaging it would had to have done it from inside the ship.”

“And she had the code to enter your ship because you’d given it to her so she could sneak in and see you,” Stiles concludes.

Derek nods.

“It’s not your fault!” says Stiles, suddenly and fiercely protective. You were in love! Of course you didn’t think she could be a murderous psychobeast from hell!”

Derek snorts and wipes his eyes.

“Besides, you were how old? Sixteen? And she was in her twenties, I’m guessing. She took advantage of you. Everyone I know calls that statutory rape. You are in no way responsible for what she did.”

“I know. But I still feel partially responsible. I didn’t kill my grandparents, but I made it possible for them to be killed. And I knew better. My parents told me countless times never to give out the code. But I did it anyway.”

Stiles doesn’t know what to say to that. What can he say? He didn’t give his mother frontotemporal dementia but he still feels partially responsible for hastening her death. His behavior issues didn’t come to him fully formed as a teenager. He was an expert at pushing her buttons by the time he was three.

“Anyway,” says Derek, taking a mighty breath and sitting up straighter on the couch. “I didn’t tell you all this to get maudlin. I told you because I just know Kate’s the one behind the attack on my vessel. The problem is, I can’t prove it.”

Stiles turns everything over in his mind, tries to see a way to make everything float and nothing sink to the bottom. The salvaged ship in his hold should reveal _something_. And he’s sure he can sneak a copy of the Hale houseship explosion file from his dad’s office. Maybe do a little investigation of his own. “Derek, let’s make a deal. If you help us amass our fortunes, we’ll help you gather evidence against Kate.”

Derek looks at Stiles for a long moment, full of hope.

“Do we have an accord?” Aaand _there’s_ the scowl Stiles knows and loves.

“Idiot. Fine.”

::-------------------------------------::

“One lifeboat got away when we attacked the pirate ship, but we salvaged the vessel,” says Stiles, as he leads Derek out of the lounge and across the bridge. “It’s in cargo hold D. Take Isaac and Erica with you to investigate. Allison will assist. Got that, Allison?”

“Got it.”

He sends Derek on his way and trudges down the hall to his own quarters, gathering Lydia on the way.

“What’s up?” She says, settling onto the end of his bed.

Stiles crashes onto the wrinkled blankets and sighs. “Derek’s going to help us amass our fortunes.”

She narrows her eyes. “And this is bad because…?”

“I may have promised to help him out in return.”

“Stiles!” She barks, looking positively baleful. He manfully does his best not to curl up into a ball. “What did you promise him?”

He winces. “I uh… I may have promised our help investigating a possible connection between the attack on his family’s houseship ten years ago and the pirate attack on his military transport?”

A light dawns slowly in her eyes. It starts out sparkly and turns positively smug. “Oh! Well, that’s not so bad then, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Stiles, did you ever listen to the recording I made of the transmission I captured?”

::-------------------------------------::

“I’ll kill her,” says Derek.

They’re on the bridge, every one of them, and Jackson’s on the tri-D. They’ve listened to the transmission twenty or thirty times. Lydia and Danny have run voice comparison tests between the transmission and fourteen random news broadcasts and interviews containing Kate’s voice. It’s been a match every time. And yeah, maybe it’s unfair that Stiles had Derek listen to the recording in front of everyone else, but he’s got the best crew around and he wants their two cents’ worth.

“I’ll kill her, and then make sure she goes to prison for life, and then hire someone Inside to kill her again. I’m going to disembowel her. Ooh, or rip her throat out—”

“Whoa, there, lone wolf. We still need more proof. Let’s make a realistic plan, OK?” Stiles settles into the corner of the Captain’s chair and throws his leg over the armrest. “First things first. Derek, do you have enough technical savvy to get the time machine installed in the Allison?”

“I’ll assist,” says Danny. He looks positively aglow at the opportunity to get a look at it up close. Or maybe that’s Derek he wants to get an up-close look at.

Stiles’s stomach twinges.

Derek gives Danny a nod. “We can do it. Give us a couple hours.”

“Good,” says Stiles, swallowing down a wave of irritation. “Now, I’ve given some thought to how we’re going to conduct our raids,” he says. “Allison, please take minutes so everyone can pay attention.”

“You got it.”

“We’re going to use the time machine to our advantage. First thing tomorrow, we’re going to hop to about ten years from now and download the previous five years’ worth of Shipping News. We’re going to find out who’s shipping what where, what the galactic trends are.”

“That still doesn’t give us information on individual shipments. How is that going to help us?” asks Jackson from the tri-D. He’s lying on top of the water in his swimming pool. The awesome thing about having a swimming pool on Beacon Free is the zoning requirements, which prescribe minimum mineral salt concentrations. They do it for two reasons: to prevent bacterial growth and to keep the water in the pool. The water’s about twice as salty as the Dead Sea, has lots of the same health benefits, and is almost impossible to drown in. Stiles tears his eyes away from the pool and swerves his attention back to the present when he realizes everyone’s waiting for him to answer. He flips his leg off the armrest and sits up straight on the edge of his chair.

“Uh…. Since most shipping companies archive their manifests seven years after shipment, we’re going to hop seven years further into the future and raid the shipping company archives. Danny, you’ll be instrumental in gathering that data.”

Danny flashes his dimples.

“Then, we’re coming back to just after we left tomorrow morning and going shopping. We’re all going to go through every manifest and pick out low-profile, low-security, but most importantly, _non-anachronistic_ payloads that have the potential to pay well. That means no high fashion items, nothing with a serial number on it, things like that. We’re probably going to have the most luck with fresh foodstuffs and things like fine perfumes that don’t have the lot number written on the bottle or box. We don’t want anyone back home in 2314 figuring out that the goods they’re trafficking or consuming came from 2324. Once we pick out likely candidates, we give those manifests to Jackson, who will have the final say. Jackson, you know your clients. You know what you can unload quickly and profitably.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our goal is one billion galactic credits.”

Wolf whistles abound.

“And when we’re done, in exchange for Derek helping us, we’re going to help Derek gather the proof he needs to convict Kate Argent of killing his family and sabotaging his mission.”

Cheering, and more whistles.

“And then,” says Stiles, coming to a decision and leaning back into his seat, gulping down the sudden ball of nerves choking him, “we’re going to retire.”

Crickets.

::-------------------------------------::

“You’re going to have to talk about it sometime, you know.”

“Yes Derek, I know.”

“They think you want out. That you don’t want to be friends anymore.”

“That’s ridiculous. Of course I don’t want that.”

“Then _tell_ them.”

“Yeah… okay. I will.”

“When?”

“Soon! Soon, okay? It’s not like we don’t have a lot of work to get through right now.”

“…”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

::-------------------------------------::

“Time travel doesn’t feel like anything.”

“No – it doesn’t.”

“When you first started training, how did you even know you were going somewhen? Heh. See what I did there.”

“Ah ha ha. Yes. I see what you did there, Stiles, you’re so clever.”

“Asshole. Just tell me. I’m curious.”

“Fine. In the early days, we jumped time near base. Base broadcasts local sidereal time and galactic atomic time on a military subether frequency continuously. We jumped in the same relative position every time, then just listened and checked our calibration from that.”

“Cool.”

“Everything’s cesium-based. We didn’t expect we’d be more than a femtosecond off, seeing as we never went more than 50 years in either direction.”

“Ooh, talk technical to me, baby.”

“ _Now_ who’s the asshole.”

“…”

“Oh, for crying out loud. Quit laughing and get back to work.”

::-------------------------------------::

“Captain, I’m registering a steady increase in positron emissions originating 47.254 degrees starboard, declination 12.755 degrees.”

“Standard evasive maneuvers, Scott.”

“Aye Captain.”

“Coming within range of ion signatures. Captain, they don’t match any known ship.”

“Thank you, Lydia. Fucking future. Danny, how are we coming with that decryption?”

“Any moment now…”

“Commence download immediately once you’re in.”

“Stiles—”

“Not now, Derek.”

“Yes now. I recognize the ion signature. That’s a navy security fleet vessel.”

“Ohshit. What are they doing guarding a commercial shipping archive? Danny? Where are we?”

“Download 16 percent complete.”

“Derek, get set to jump us back home. Erica, initiate shielding procedure, set focus 47.254 degrees starboard, declination 12.755 degrees and tracking.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Time stamp locked in, Captain. What about our next archive spot?”

“We’ve only got one left. Not worth it.”

“Captain, we’re being hailed. Standard query.”

“Eighty eight percent, Captain.”

“Derek, jump immediately at 100 percent. Lydia, respond with solar flare-type static.”

“Aye Captain.”

“Ninety six, ninety seven, ninety eight…”

“Captain! Sharp increase in gamma bow-wave radiation!”

“ _Jump!_ ”

“Erica, radiation report!”

“Systems report normal radiation levels across the spectrum. Shields holding. Let’s no one tell Boyd about the gamma radiation, okay?”

“Danny, did we manage to get the download?”

“With about three milliseconds to spare.”

“Derek, one zillisecond more and we would have been crispy fried plasma. When are we?”

“…Zillisecond?”

“Yes, Isaac. Zillisecond. It’s a technical term I’ve just coined representing the smallest unit of time before being destroyed by a gamma ray. Allison – add it to the ship dictionary.”

“It’s in there. Right between ‘zillipede’ and ‘zimb’. Both insects.”

“Good grief. Derek?”

“We’re home, Captain. 11.15.2314. Eight oh five point oh galactic atomic time.

“Ugh. We’re going to be so jetlagged today.”

“Wow, it’s still the 15th. And Thanksgiving’s in four days.”

“Seriously? I think we need to be giving thanks _right now._ ”

“Give all the thanks you want, but not until you’ve all had a nap. Two hours mandatory minimum. Back me up, Captain.”

“Ah, Boyd! There you are. I approve your motion.”

“Aww, Captain!”

::-------------------------------------::

It’s Sunday dinner on the good ship Allison, a time that Stiles holds sacred. If they’re out in space, and it’s Sunday, there will be dinner in the dining room at 4 PM sharp ship’s time, served family style. Everyone’s expected to be there unless they’re bleeding out. (Which has happened on more than one occasion. Only a couple months before this whole fiasco started, he found himself in Scott’s quarters, spooning some rather spectacular chicken and rice soup into Scott’s mouth and regaling him with tales of Stiles’s bravery, finding a half-dead Scott with two broken arms trapped in the burning wreckage of a merchant ship they were raiding and activating his emergency transporter button for him).

Despite missing their last archival raid they’ve ended up with a ridiculous number of manifests to go through, so Stiles has lifted the ‘no reading at the table during Sunday dinner’ rule and everyone’s going through manifests while they eat.

“Allison, do you promise to cook like this for me when we’re married?” asks Scott, leafing through refrigerated poultry manifests and shoveling in huge bites of Salisbury steak.

“Every day.”

“Dude,” Stiles whispers, elbowing Scott in the side, “you haven’t even had your first date yet. Aren’t you jumping the gun an eensy-weensy bit?”

Scott shoots him the ‘dude, shut up!’ look and points at the ceiling. No, not at the ceiling. At the comm screen.

“Ugh. You guys are even more sickening than me and Boyd,” says Erica. Out loud.

“Erica?” says Allison, in a voice that would put treacle and honey to shame. Stiles very suddenly wants to be very far away.

“Yeah.”

“Lydia added some words to my dictionary recently. Really prosaic four- and five-letter ones. Some of which start with the letter ‘b’.”

Erica gulps. “Uh… yeah?”

“Mmmhmmm. She taught me how to use them, too. How to target them effectively so they’ll do the most damage,” Allison says, ending on a honeycrisp note.

“I’m sorry!”

“Of course you are. Enjoy your dinner.”

Erica looks at her plate and puts her fork down. Stiles shoots a quick glance at everyone else. They’re _incredibly_ interested in their manifests.

Lydia breaks the mood. “Ooh! This one’s got a lot of Maison de Gloire blouses! Stiles, I know it’s anachronistic, but we have to go for this shipment. There’s only…” she leafs quickly through the rest of the manifest. “Oh! Everything’s Maison de Gloire! There’s 144 lots in this shipment but only one is blouses. The rest are lotion gift sets, and… oh my God, one lot of _shoes_. Please, Stiles? Don’t make me ask twice.”

Erica holds her hand out and Lydia hands over the manifest. She looks through it and sighs. “I’ve never had a pair of Maison de Gloire shoes before.”

And Stiles has never heard Erica sound so wistful before. “Fine. Give the list to Jackson. He can fence the lotion and you two can keep the shirts and shoes. If anyone asks, you found them in a little spaceport boutique on the other side of the galaxy in Auriga South.”

“I wish I could pick a manifest,” says Allison.

Captain Stiles, Equilibrium Manager, to the rescue. “How ‘bout I get you some extra top-of-the-line processing memory, instead? But you don’t have to lie and say you got it in Auriga South. Unless you _want_ to lie about it, of course.”

“Aww, Captain, that’s so sweet! Thank you!”

“Now,” he says, changing subjects before anyone else can start clambering for handouts, “We need to talk a little bit about scheduling. Jackson’s got most of the manifests in place and he’s going to give us the schedule, no more than three a week, so we have time to get the work done and take a break, and he has time to get the stuff sold before the next shipment arrives. He has a few choice spots left to round out our numbers, which is what we’re looking for tonight, so please pass on anything promising to him. But as it stands right now, we’ve got about six months of steady work ahead of us—” loud groaning “—with a huge payout by the end of it. A billion, give or take, split nine ways will give us just over 100 million apiece. That’s more than enough to be comfortable the rest of our lives.”

“And if it’s not?” he says, shooting a baleful glare at all and sundry because he loves them all and wants them to _get it_ , “We’ll take care of each other. Like we always have. Because that’s what friends are for, right?” He watches his crew side eye one another with relieved little smiles.

Stiles feels the side of his face heat up. He looks over and Derek’s staring at him. “What?”

“Nine?” Derek mouths.

Stiles puts his fork down. He’s done eating, anyway. “Yes, nine,” he says, in a loud enough voice to be heard by everyone at the table. “You, me, Scott, Allison, Isaac, Lydia, Erica, Boyd and Jackson. Derek, if you’re done, would you join me in the lounge? I’ve found something you might find interesting.”

Derek’s eyebrows perk up and he stares at Stiles for a long moment. “…Fine.”

Lydia and Erica shoot each other a look and say, “Oooh!” in unison.

“Is that what we’re calling it these days?” says Allison.

“Oh my God, you guys! I’m rescinding my Maison de Gloire offer. And you can forget about all that swank extra processing memory, Allison.”

“What?” shrieks Lydia. “You wouldn’t!”

“Because we’re _eternally_ sorry,” says Erica.

“And we promise not to spy on you,” says Allison.

Stiles looks up just in time to catch Lydia slicing her finger across her throat at the comm screen feed and attempting a hasty eyebrow-lashing at Allison. Hrm. “ _What?_ ” He asks. “Fine. Derek, my quarters. Now.” He can’t believe it. His own crew! His _ship!_

“Hey, I really was just kidding!” says Allison, as he walks out of the dining room with Derek. “Stiles? _Stiles!_.”

The last thing he hears is Allison’s faint, “Darn it!” filtering down the hall as he shuts and locks the door to his room. He manually cuts the mic and cam. He doesn’t think Allison really would spy on him, but he doesn’t want to take the chance of accidentally being recorded, either. He looks around the room, at the stack of jumpsuits strewn in a small mountain on his desk chair, at the rumpled bedclothes. He hastily straightens the bedclothes out and gestures for Derek to sit down while he rummages through the stack of junk on his desk for a tablet.

“Aha,” he says, pulling one out of the pile. He sits down next to Derek on the bed and pulls up the file on the Hale disaster.

“I went through this with a fine tooth comb last night when I got back,” says Stiles. “This is probably nothing you haven’t seen already, but look at this.”

Stiles pages through until they get to the investigation. Stiles points to the signature at the bottom of the report.

“The investigator was Garrison Myers. What you don’t know and I do know is that Myers isn’t an insurance investigator anymore. And the only reason I know that is because he’s been piloting an earth-to-orbit shuttle for the past three years. Until his shuttle exploded, that is. _Last week_.”

Next to him he hears Derek’s breath hitch. “When?” he asks.

“Three days after our attack on your pirates,” says Stiles. “Just enough time for whomever was in the escape pod that got away to get to Beacon and sabotage that flight.”

“Kate.”

“I think so. No proof, though, and dad’s still investigating his case, so he was pretty closed-mouth about it.”

Derek takes in a deep breath and lets it out. “We need incontrovertible proof. DNA evidence that she was on or in that shuttle. And on my family’s houseship.”

“Which is probably available, if Kate felt the need to buy him off and then kill him for it later.”

Stiles toes off his shoes and scoots back until he’s leaning against the headboard. He pats the space next to him. Derek stares at him for a long moment, face blank, then kicks off his own shoes and joins him. He ends up much closer than Stiles expected. Derek leans his head back and shuts his eyes.

“Derek. Do you remember the code to get on your family’s ship?”

Derek’s eyes open back up. “Yes. Why?”

“You need to get back on your ship and collect evidence. Get video of her planting the bomb. That should be enough to convict her of first degree murder.”

They sit silent for a long time, while Derek mulls it over in silence. Eventually, he asks, “But what about espionage? What about hijacking a military vessel and committing an act of terrorism?”

Derek turns toward Stiles. His hand lands on Stiles’s knee and burns a hole in his pants. Stiles fully expects that if he looks down, he will see charred cotton jump suit. Or maybe it’s just that Stiles is hyperaware of the heat of Derek’s hand touching him, about a thousand times more intense than every waking dream he’s had about it. Derek’s voice, when he speaks again, startles Stiles. “I don’t just want to take her down. I want to damage the credibility of whoever it is in her family who’s supporting or collaborating with her. I know she’s not working alone. She has to be getting her money from somewhere. Someone in her family’s covering up for her.”

Stiles thinks about it for a moment. “If we play our cards right, we’ll get all of them,” he says. “Let’s concentrate on the physical evidence, first. I’ll have Allison go over all the voice profiles in the recording and run them against representative voice samples of everyone in the Argent family. Maybe we can get a match there. And you and I are going to put together everything we can gather about the night your family was attacked and plan a way to sneak in and gather evidence. And Derek?” In a fit of infinite stupidity and bravery, Stiles lays his hand over Derek’s.

Derek looks at their hands, then raises his eyes to Stiles’s.

“I think it’s time we bring my dad into it.”

::-------------------------------------::

“You did _what?_ ”

Stiles fidgets in the chair across from his dad’s desk at the Beacon Free Space Port Sheriff’s Office and for the first time since suggesting it to Derek, thinks that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea after all.

“Uh.” He winces.

“Give me one good reason right now why I shouldn’t have you charged with kidnapping a military officer and stealing evidence of a crime.”

“Well, technically, a case file isn’t evidence—”

“Sir – as we explained, Stiles actually _rescued_ me, not—”

Stiles’s dad turns a smooth, icy glare on Derek. “Son, you are speaking out of turn.”

Next to Stiles, Derek gulps and sinks further into his chair. “Sorry, sir.”

Stiles leans a little closer until their elbows are touching. “Look, dad, we have some pretty solid evidence that Kate Argent committed—”

“Kate _Argent?_ Of the ruling family Argents, _that_ Kate Argent?” His dad’s face is doing something terrible and Stiles has to suppress an immediate, panicky urge to _backupgetaway_. He feels Derek’s hand on his arm and he sucks in a choked breath.

“Yeah. We have a voice—”

“Stop! Just – stop.” His dad comes out from behind his desk. Stiles shrinks into Derek’s side as his dad shuts the blinds, then sticks his head out the door. “Tara, hold my calls for the next hour.” He shuts the door, and locks it.

“All right. You have evidence? I want it. _All_ of it.”

Stiles exchanges a glance with Derek. He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and pulls up the file of everything they’ve compiled to date on his tablet. An hour and a half later, after Stiles and Derek present both the solid and circumstantial evidence (Stiles, of course, hiding anything piratey), after Derek’s embarrassing confession of being duped and his involvement in Black Wolf since its inception, and after the outline of their plans to gather damning evidence and get Kate and her accomplices convicted, Sheriff Stilinski is calling Derek _son_ the way he sometimes calls Scott son: with affection, respect and just a tinge of sorrow. It’s brought out his protective side, Stiles notes, and the thought of that tickles him.

“I want you to hold off using the time machine just yet,” says the Sheriff, after he’s had some time to ask questions and make sense of everything they’ve presented to him. “I’m going to reopen the case and get the evidence out of storage. I’ll have an independent explosives and arson specialist take a fresh look at everything and follow up any leads. We should have a preliminary report by Friday morning, So you may not have to risk it. And I’d prefer if you didn’t.”

He turns to Derek and grips his shoulder. “It would be too hard to explain how we came by it without also explaining your unauthorized use of the time machine, son. You’d lose your commission. And your family – well, they’d suffer the backlash, too.”

“I understand that, sir,” says Derek, steady. “But it’s worth the risk to see her pay for what she’s done.”

“Let’s hope it won’t come to that.”

::-------------------------------------::

“Now, did I tell you these were the best ribs on Beacon Free or did I _tell_ you,” says Stiles. He puts down his last bare bone and licks tangy sauce off his fingers. He looks at Derek just as he’s tossing a crisp, puffy vacuum fry in his mouth.

Derek grins at him as Stiles shoves the last bite of sweet and sour slaw in his mouth. “You told me. And I listened.” Derek stuffs the last few fry crumbs between his lips and mumbles, “’e shud get ths again.”

“Deal.”

“Hey, you wanna watch something?” says Stiles. He flicks on the remote. “Orbit channel’s running seasons one through three of Belt Miners back-to-back this weekend.”

“Sounds good,” says Derek. He wipes his fingers and tosses their empty cartons in the recycler. He hesitates getting back on the bed, eyes on Stiles’s.

Stiles nods, the barest tip of his chin, and smiles small, and just like that Derek’s crawling over his legs and settling in close.

They watch episode after episode, the volume down low. There’s no other sound in the ship. It’s a day off; everyone’s with their families for the evening, or enjoying a night on the town in port. As the evening progresses, they slowly slide into the middle of the bed, pressed together from shoulder to ankle. They barely blink awake when the 2300 news comes on. The late show comes and goes, and the late late show starts, punctuated by the occasional sounds of his crew quietly filtering in by ones and twos.

Derek stirs at a loud commercial break some time later. Derek’s warm shoulder moves under Stiles’s cheek but Stiles is drifting again in the next moment. And then Derek’s shoulder disappears completely.

“Shit. Stiles – wake up.”

“Mmmm.” Without even opening his eyes, because that would just be a ridiculous amount of effort right now, Stiles leans back on the cushioned headboard.

“Stiles, I just had a thought.”

“Mmmm?”

“Stiles!”

Stiles shocks awake and flies off the bed. He lands on the floor on his ass. “What the everlovin— _why did you do that?_ ” He levers himself up and glares at Derek until his butt’s back where it was before Derek turned into an asshole.

Derek shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “Listen. Tonight you said we’d be working raids for the next six months.”

“Yeah?” says Stiles, unimpressed.

“Well, remember your dad said he’d probably have evidence on Friday.”

“And?” Stiles gestures _get on with it_.

“He can’t withhold evidence for _six months_. What do you think’s going to happen with the time machine?”

Stiles slides right back off the bed and lands on his ass with a thump. “Holy. Galactic. _MOTHER!_ ”

Derek’s peering over the edge of the bed at him, looking sick, like he’s just lost something precious. Like he’s lost _time_.

 _Well, we’ll just have to make time._ Oh. That’s it! They _can_ make time. They can make all the time in the universe! He turns a blinding smile up at Derek and it makes hope blossom there. He jumps up and starts pacing the room.

“Allison, get Jackson on the horn.”

“Aye, Captain!”

He flips through the jumpsuits on chair looking for one that, at the very least, doesn’t have barbecue sauce all over it. He sniffs one, then skims out of the one he’s wearing.

“Jesus, Stilinski! Cover up!”

“Jackson! I’m an idiot! I fucked up in the worst way possible! I hope you’re recording because I’m never saying that again, either. Look,” he says, stumbling one leg at a time into the jumpsuit and overbalancing into the bed, “I need you to give us what you have of your master manifest list right now. I know you still had a few spaces open, but how many manifests total?”

Jackson shifts some tablets around on his desk, then picks one up. “Uh… I’ve worked it out to about 225 shipments. Manifests for each of them range from two to ten million credits worth of goods, averaging out to near four and a half million per shipment. That should net us our billion credit goal.”

Stiles does some quick math in his head. “Then first thing in the morning, and I mean _first_ thing, don’t even stop to comb one pretty little hair on your head, I need you go get out to the warehouse district and rent an empty warehouse for immediate occupancy.”

“What?!” Jackson exclaims, going red in the face. “I’m going to have to sign over half my assets to get something that fast no questions asked.”

Jackson’s arms are flapping as he complains, so he’s probably really upset, but Stiles says, “I don’t care what you have to sign over to get it! Sign it over! You’ll get it back in spades, I promise. Over the course of the next three days.”

Jackson scoffs.

“Now, listen. It’s going to need to be about a cubic hectare. Zero g, with tethering. Don’t bother with shelving. And it’s got to have spot stasis throughout! We’ll have a lot of fresh meat and produce and it’ll need to be kept perfectly fresh until you can unload it.

“And while you’re doing that, send your new second down to the docks and get 60 day laborers. Three shifts, 20 workers a shift. Standard wages. Until 10 AM Friday morning and possibly longer, this is going to be a round the clock operation, and we don’t stop until the work is done. Anyone wants overtime, they got it. Double time. Anyone who works out their full shifts and keeps coming back every day until the work is done? Gets their wages doubled at the end.” Stiles looks up from his buttons and sees Jackson on the tri-D typing like mad, making notes.

“Designate a staging area the size of our cargo holds. Unshielded. We’ll be beaming cargo to you every twenty minutes _without fail_ , so if you can’t get the staging area cleared in 20 minutes, hire more workers for each shift. Timing is crucial. At least, it’ll be crucial on this end of time.”

“And I gather that’s not where you’re going to be?”

“We’re not. We’ll make base in the future. It won’t matter how much time passes there, but I promise we’re not going to cool our heels. We’ll stick to our original schedule. Three raids a week. That’ll give us time for repairs and maintenance and enough down time to keep healthy. We’ll be gone about six months, but you’ll see us for a minute or so out of every twenty.”

Jackson looks up from his notes. “Lydia…”

Stiles holds up a bit and softens at Jackson’s tone. “She doesn’t know yet. We just worked out that it’s going to be an issue. I’m about to tell her.”

Jackson gives Stiles a lingering look, then nods. “Okay. Look, Stilinski… what happened?”

Stiles looks down at his fingers and feels his cheeks heat. “I really did fuck up. We might have to give up the time machine as early as Friday.”

Stiles hangs up and stands. He bounces on his toes. He sees Derek’s washed his face and brushed the crumbs off his uniform. Of course, he didn’t get any barbecue sauce on _his_ clothes. “Come on. We need to go talk to the others right away.”

He’d distracted enough that after he ushers Derek out, he completely forgets to hold the door. It slams.

“GODDAMNIT STILES, WHAT DID I TEL YOU ABOUT THE DOOR?” trails after him to the bridge, in Erica’s voice.

Stiles doesn’t care, he’s already slapping his hand down on the klaxon. “All hands on deck!”

::-------------------------------------::

They filter in, in various stages ranging from still drunk to uncomfortably hung over. Stiles explains as quickly as he can and then shuts up and bites his lip. He lets them complain and bitch at him for a solid two minutes because he feels guilty.

“Look, I told you guys at the beginning we’ll have time to get every thing done,” he finally cuts in. “Maintenance, beauty rest, the whole shebang. It’s still going to take about six months. It just won’t be six months in _this_ time. I’ll even give you guys a week off in the middle of it, so you can have some relaxing vacation time. And I’ll pay for everything. Vacation costs, spending money, all of it on the company card. Okay?”

They’re grumpy, but they consent.

“Okay. Here’s how we’re going to work it. We’ll set up base camp about fifty years in the future. No one will be looking for us then, and if we run into ourselves, we’ll look so different that no one will recognize us. We’ll stick spatially close to Beacon so nothing’s too foreign. Three raids a week, according to the master manifest list, which, if Jackson’s not asleep at the wheel, should be accessible to you now. Time travel from our staging area to the proper era, space travel to the raid, obtain goods, standard rescue and clean-up protocol, space travel to the staging area, time travel _to an extremely tight point in space and time_ right outside the warehouse Jackson’s renting, beam the cargo into the staging area he’s setting up in there, then immediately time travel back to base time, then space travel back to camp. Rest, rinse, repeat.

“With that in mind, Allison, find us an asteroid in a stable dust cloud within a milliparsec of Beacon Free. We want to hide, but not too far away. Close enough that we can use the shuttle to go back and forth to port.

“Lydia, I want you to place a hundred thousand company credits in an interest bearing annuity in the company name that matures in 50 years. Then set up a document naming all of us as officers of the company, so we will all have access to the funds when we get there. We’ll redeem the annuity and use the net after taxes to support ourselves for our six month stay. In fifty years’ time, we’ll have _plenty_ of funds.

“Any questions?”

Crickets.

“Okay. We leave first thing in the morning, so go back to sleep. But not you, Lydia. You should probably call Jackson first.”

She gives him a sad, resolute look, and slips on her headset.

::-------------------------------------::

Tri-D in the future is _sleek_. So sleek, Stiles finally broke down and bought a set-up for the lounge off the bridge, which he swore he’d never do. Everyone’s flopped all over the couches and arm chairs after dinner in their pajamas for Movie Monday on the Eclipse Classic Movie channel. Eclipse never runs movies less than four stars on Mondays. Today, they’re running the Arbiter of Time trilogy, which everyone agrees are the best future movies they’ve seen so far. Stiles downloads the extended version of all three the second he can, and even persuades Derek to watch them in his quarters with him on one occasion. They originally came out about ten years after the public launch of the Black Wolf initiative, which Stiles thinks is just about right, _seeing as they’re a fictional interpretation of Derek Hale and his missions_.

The actor they got to portray Derek looks nothing like him. Derek and Stiles both think so. Also, “Those command controls look completely ridiculous. Nothing makes sense on them! And temporal commanders _do not_ have a special uniform! Every naval commander wears the same uniform. This one!” Derek points at his chest. “No one calls the commander in charge of temporal travel the Arbiter of Time, and at _no time ever_ did we ever consider referring to time travel as _doing the time warp!_ ”

Stiles laughs for five minutes straight, until Derek disappears into his room (the _guest_ room!), and sulks until Stiles apologizes in front of everybody like he means it.

Later on, Stiles says, “You have to admit it makes for great drama, though.” He feels like he’s won when, the next time they make a temporal jump, Derek says, “Commencing time warp!” in a surprisingly accurate Arbiter of Time voice, sending the entire crew into peals of laughter.

They’ve seen lots of other really excellent movies, too, though. And for as much as every one of them bitches when someone else spoils them for the latest episode of Belt Miner or Port Patrol when they’re in their home era, not a single one of them regrets spoiling themselves for the best movies coming up in their future. And the general consensus? Movies in the future are _kickass_.

It isn’t until Stiles settles down at the table behind the couches with a bowl of salty popcorn and a root beer and butter brickle double awful (what – so, he’s trying something new!) that he realizes Derek’s not in the room. He slugs down a huge gulp of soda, winces at the fizz, and slips out the door.

He finds Derek on his knees in the doorframe to Stiles’s quarters. He’s got the door off its mountings and… “Are those soft-close hinges?”

Derek finishes tightening a screw and looks up at him. Every pore is radiating happiness. “Yep.” Stiles smiles and crouches down in the corridor to watch.

He’s not surprised to find Derek in his room. The longer they’re based at The Cove, which is what they’ve taken to calling their little hiding spot, the less Derek wants to mingle and the more time he tries to spend in Stiles’s quarters. He thinks it might be because Derek sees it as a safe place to think undisturbed. Live on a ship in close quarters for any length of time and almost anyone craves space after awhile. But Derek – it’s been especially hard on him, and Stiles thinks he might know why.

He watches Derek work, then tries the direct approach. “Derek, what’s wrong.”

To his credit, Derek doesn’t even try to dissemble. But he doesn’t answer right away, either, and when he does, it’s not a direct answer.

“Every day I see how much we get accomplished, moving through time like this,” he says, drilling a small hole for a screw.

“We get a lot done, don’t we? Hardly any mishaps, either,” says Stiles.

“Yeah,” Derek smiles, but doesn’t look up from his work. He keeps going in silence for a bit, then says, “I know why you’ve based us here, so far in the future. You don’t want to fuck up our present.”

Derek holds himself just the wrong side of stiffly. Like he’s waiting for something. An argument, maybe.

Stiles sees a decoy, and looks behind it. “You know you can’t go back and make it so the fire never happened. You _know_ that would create an unresolvable paradox. Right?”

Derek puts in the last screw and swings the door back and forth a few times. No squeaks. He and Stiles file in, and he flings the door shut. No slam. Just a quiet click. “I know. It just makes me feel like I’m losing them all over again.”

The breath catches in Stiles’s throat. He grabs Derek by the arm and swings him around. What he sees in Derek’s expression makes him fold himself around Derek and hold him tight.

It’s a long moment before Derek lifts his arms and holds on, too.

“They aren’t coming back, and you can never replace them,” says Stiles. “But you can always collect more.”

Derek turns his head and murmurs against Stiles’s lips, “Then if it’s okay with you, I’m going to put you in my pocket now.”

Suddenly Stiles’s feet are no longer on the floor, and he’s lying on the bed under Derek. His heart is too full. It’s pushing against his throat, and he can’t say anything. He presses his feelings into the skin of Derek’s neck with his lips, with his teeth.

Derek undresses him, clothes first, then his heart. He lays Stiles bare and cherishes him, with his cock and mouth and hands.

 

 

“I spent my whole life living for them,” says Derek, a precious time later, as they lie together in a pool of their own heat. “For my family, as a political unit.”

“It can’t have been easy, growing up under so much scrutiny,” says Stiles, against the hollow of Derek’s neck.

“Black Wolf was conceived when I was in middle school. Right from the start, they planned for me to go to officer school and bend my career toward command. Even back then, they wanted to make sure the project had family oversight for as long as possible. And that’s what I did. I was in place and ready to go, the perfect choice to command Black Wolf once my family turned the project over to the navy for trials.” Derek noses through the hair on top of Stiles’s head, breathes deep, exhales.

“Do you have any regrets?” Stiles asks.

“No. None,” says Derek, mouth in Stiles’s hair. “But it’s not what I would have chosen for myself.”

They lie there so quiet that Stiles is drifting off when Derek asks, “What about you? Did you always want to be a pirate?”

Stiles feels Derek’s smile open up on the top of his head. He grins against Derek’s collarbone. “No. Not beyond preschool, anyway.”

He’s quiet for a moment before he continues, “My mom died when I was ten, of an early-onset variant of dementia. I went off the rails, a bit. I barely scraped by in school and Scott and I were always getting into trouble. Nothing _too_ serious, nothing my dad could arrest us for except for once, but Jackson dropped the charges.”

“I sense a story there?”

Stiles grins. “Ask Scott. Or me, someday, when I’m not all wrapped up in you. Anyway, Scott and I were too busy to care much about school. We just scraped by, and when we got out, we had nothing else to do. I took my inheritance from my mom and bought my first ship, and Scott and I went into the hauling and salvage business. It’s not like we were ever going to make it to college. I hired Erica and Isaac first thing, because we needed muscle and they’d graduated with us and needed jobs.

“One day when I was hanging out in Grundy’s down by Hub D, a guy approached me about a haul and salvage job. He brought his own crew with him. They were pretty rough. We got to the salvage site and it was pretty obvious someone had been there recently with a lot of fire power. His crew salvaged the cargo and the drive off the vessel, then vaporized the hull. My crew and I kept silent and didn’t say word one about it until we got back and his outfit unloaded out of our cargo bay. I’d checked our account before we left and money’d been there so I just wanted them to finish and leave because they were seriously freaking us out. The guy never said one thing to me until the last of his guys were leaving my ship. Then he said, ‘if you stay quiet about this, you’ll find a 50 percent bonus in your account at the end of the quarter.’ Well, that was a month and a half from then so all I said was ‘Sure thing!’ and then he was gone. I’d almost forgotten about him until I found a hefty twenty five grand extra in my account the beginning of April. Just in time for tax time, too.

And we were _broke_. Not a lot of business out of Beacon Free at that time. So after some discussion one night, I asked my crew if they had any other skills they might want to contribute to the business. Scotty, I knew, wouldn’t be willing to do much more than drive, but he was good with his fists if push came to shove. Isaac turned out to be really good at cleaning up, and Erica had perfect aim. I found us a few more jobs where I found the last one, and we managed to make a pretty fair penny.

I got enough money to make Lydia an offer. And with her came Jackson, who was perfect once I persuaded him to come on board, because Jackson already did wholesaling and had an established clientele who bought lots from him regularly. The next ship we raided was the Allison. She was brand new and on her way to be scrapped because of asteroid damage, but she was big and fresh, otherwise, much bigger than my old ship, so I hired Danny to help with the technical aspects. I gave everyone else leave while Scott and Danny and I spent months getting her in working order. After that, I offered Danny a position and he stayed.

I got injured on our next raid. A bigger vessel meant we could take on bigger ships, but we forgot to account for their bigger fire power. Scott got us out of there, and Erica called her boyfriend Dr. Boyd, in a panic because apparently I was bleeding out all over Allison and she was freaking out about sticky circuits and rust, of all things. I asked Boyd to come aboard with us, and he stayed, too.”

He stops to take a breath, and feels Derek reaching behind him. In a moment, he’s pressing a bottle of water into Stiles’s hand. Stiles pops the suck-top and gulps down a few fresh swallows.

“Anyway, the point of all that,” he continues on, after handing the bottle back to Derek, “was that, unlike your life, nothing in my life was planned. It all just sort of fell into place spur of the mo-hooo-ho-homent,” he says around a yawn.

“Let’s sleep, okay?” Derek pets the back of Stiles’s head once, twice, then his hand falls lax.

 _Okay_ , Stiles thinks. He drifts, on the way to sleep, and has just enough consciousness left to wonder whether or not he and Derek might be too different to be together.

 

Not much is different the next day. It’s Tuesday, a regular off day. Danny’s working on some of Allison’s essential circuits, Erica and Boyd are sleeping, Scott and Isaac are playing lacrosse with the gravity turned off in the main cargo bay and Lydia is studying Ancient Sumerian. For fun. But Derek? He’s the exception. He’s smiling and engaging. He brings Stiles breakfast in bed, and feels more free and easy than he has in the time Stiles has known him. It opens up a honey-stream of fondness in Stiles, all golden-thick and viscous.

After Derek puts the remains of their breakfast in the recycler, he asks, “Would it be okay to borrow the shuttle and go down to Beacon Free? I want to look up a couple things in the library. You can come with, if you’re not busy?”

So that’s how they end up sitting in the filtered sunshine in stacks, kissing like teenagers, until Mrs. Robbins chases them back to their table. Stiles has no idea what’s so interesting about the history of galactic gambling that has Derek wanting to come to the library today, but his research doesn’t take too long, and soon enough they’re on their way back to The Cove. Back _home_.

::-------------------------------------::

“Okay, Scotty, get us out of here!”

Stiles files onto the bridge after Scott, everyone else following. He slumps down in the Captain’s chair, watches Scott murmuring with Allison getting the course back to their rendezvous point so they can travel back for their last warehouse dropoff. He watches Scott set and then engaging the neutron potentiator drive. They’ll be at the rendezvous point in about two and a half hours. He shifts his gaze to the forward screen and blankly watches the star lines zip past.

Lydia removes her gloves finger by finger and plops them down on the comms console in front of her. Stiles swings his head right and stares tiredly at her. She leans back in her chair and stares unblinking at the forward screen.

“I can’t believe we’re done,” says Erica. She shuffles back to the gunner’s chair from the replicator with two bottles of water and sinks down onto Boyd’s lap. He hitches her up under his arm and takes a swig out of the bottle she hands him.

Stiles looks around at his crew, his tired, hard-working crew. Everyone’s listless and exhausted, staring blankly at the forward screen as though it were Movie Monday back at the Cove on the tri-D. He turns back and stares, too. It’s mesmerizing, watching the stars blink in as points in the middle of the screen, grow lines, and disappear off the sides of the display.

His gaze shifts to Derek in the copilot’s seat, where he’s checking the temporal settings. “Yo, Clock Commander!”

Derek turns around and levels a cool stare at him. “I prefer to be known as the Arbiter of Time.”

That sets Stiles off in a fit of giggles, and pretty much everyone else, too. 

“We’ve got a couple hours to kill before we make the drop with Jackson. How about a nap?”

Stiles hears four distinct groans, and one quiet, “Sure.”

“No comments from the peanut gallery, please,” he says, and drags Derek by the hand down the corridor.

“Tomorrow’s Friday,” says Stiles, when they’ve cuddled each other into a comfortable position on the bed. Well, it would be Friday in a few hours, but they’re headed back to Friday in their own time for good, tomorrow, to find out what Stiles’s dad has learned. Stiles is suddenly completely homesick. He’s never gone so long before without seeing his dad. Six whole months! “We’ll find out what my dad knows, and then…”

“And then you have to take me to my command post. Are you sure you don’t want me to launch you back to the present after you drop me off? I have my own beam launcher from pre-manned trials—”

“No! No, it’s OK. We’re going to take a little break, then descend on my dad for Thanksgiving, since we will have missed it. We all know to keep our butts firmly out of the vicinity of the warehouse so we don’t run into each other. We’re parking Allison at The Cove, actually, but in our time, and shuttling down to my dad’s private dock, so no one will be the wiser. We could use a few days to decompress.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Just—be careful.”

“I wish you could be with us. You need a break, too.”

Derek huffs a breath that ruffles the hair on top of Stiles’s head. “What are you going to tell your dad, about why I’m not there?”

Stiles’s stomach quakes uncomfortably. “I… I hadn’t thought about that.”

He feels Derek smile. “Just tell him I thought I was recognized so I’m in hiding on the Allison and nothing you said could persuade me to come down.”

Stiles smiles. “That’ll work. He respects caution.” Another stomach twang. This one prickles behind his eyes. “Derek?” he asks, his voice a little more tremulous than it should ever be, “Am I ever going to see you again, after tomorrow?”

Derek pulls away far enough to look at him, and gives him a long, enigmatic look. “I’d very much like that. But… we’ll see.”

::-------------------------------------::

_\--still time to get your ticket for tonight’s record Galactic Lotto jackpot before the drawing at 23:00 G.A.T. tonight._

_Prosecutors presented evidence today in the trial of Kate Argent implicating her father, Gerard Argent, as the source of funds used to carry out the tragic Hale houseship fire ten years ago as well as the failed attempt one month ago on Commander Derek Hale’s life. Charges have been filed against Gerard Argent, however the suspect cannot be located. Sheriff Stilinski of Beacon Free Space Port is coordinating a massive search effort with law enforcement personnel across the galaxy and is hopeful Argent will quickly be located._

_In related news, first statements are being released from the hauling and salvage crew a month after their daring rescue of Commander Derek Hale from the disintegrating remains of the military transport vessel he was aboard when it had been attacked by pirates. An interview was given to our Beacon Free GNN affiliate by the Communications Officer of The Allison, Lydia Martin: “It was purely by chance that we intercepted the communication at all. Something had gone haywire that day with our decoder, and most messages were coming in garbled. But this message came in loud and clear. I notified Captain Stilinski immediately. We were shocked to understand that it was a raid on a military vessel. Being nearby in the locale, we set our course to intercept, in case anyone needed rescue. We managed to execute an emergency transport on the only surviving life form we registered in the ship just before the pirates finished disintegrating it. We boarded their vessel in an attempt to rescue any prisoners they may have taken, but there were none.” Thank you for sharing your story, Ms. Martin._

_In election news, Hale ruling family senator Laura Hale was tapped by peers today to run in the next Galactic Presidential election. Senator Hale, whose recent success with the Black Wolf initiative has launched her political career farther than any Hale has gone since Senator Jane Hale ran against Constantine Argent in the 2256 election, is favored to win by an eight percent margin, according to the latest LexisNexis poll conducted of 10,000 galactic voters. Pundits speculate that in the event of a Laura Hale presidency, Cora Hale, currently finishing her last year at university, would take over the Hale senatorship._

_And in startling news following the latest successful Black Wolf military trial, the navy announced today that—_

Stiles, sprawled out on his bunk in the dark, absolutely not sulking after a month of silence from Derek, slaps his hand down on the tri-D remote at the sound of knocking on the door to his quarters. He sits up silently, wondering who made it onto the ship without triggering the alarms. His crew’s all down on Beacon Free right now, making last minute preparations for the money that Jackson promises will be coming in soon. (Look, Stilinski. It takes _time_ to fence a cubic hectare of goods! Keep your hair on. We’ll get our money.)

“Who is it?” he asks, quietly. He’d ask Allison, but he’s given her extended leave along with Scott, and she’s in a portable unit tucked in Scott’s pocket until he either gets back, or Stiles activates the emergency recall.

Derek walks in.

Stiles sink forward until his elbows are on his knees and his face is resting in his hands. “Oh my God. I thought I’d never see you again,” he muffles into his palms.

He feels a puff of cool air on his front and Derek’s right there, pulling his hands away from his eyes. He barely has the chance to feel the cool air drying the tears on this cheeks before they’re kissing and hugging, and tugging off one another’s clothes.

A happy time later, in the afterglow, Derek says, “I have something for you.” He leans over and pulls a small piece of paper from his jacket pocket. Which is when Stiles realizes Derek walked in in civvies, not his badass black leather navy commander uniform. Stiles is sitting up, enquiry on his tongue, because Derek’s lack of a uniform is suddenly the most important piece of information in the world. Derek derails him by handing over the piece of paper.

“A lottery ticket?” Stiles examines it. “For tonight’s drawing.” He makes to toss it on his bedside table. Derek lunges after it. “Keep it safe!” he says.

Stiles is starting to form an idea in his head.

“I resigned my commission today,” says Derek.

“Oh my God,” says Stiles.

“It’s time I started living my life for me,” says Derek.

“Oh my _God!_. That day you went to the library, back at The Cove!”

Derek smiles. “This will give you a legitimate, publicly-acceptable reason to retire. This way, no one will question your fortune.”

“Our fortune. No one will question _our_ fortune, Derek.”

Derek smiles, and a little supernova goes off in Stiles’s heart.

“Yeah. Thanks to a little time warp,” Derek says, in his best Arbiter of Time voice.

::------------------ _fin_ \------------------::

**Author's Note:**

> If any of you are curious about what Stiles is drinking, you can find a complete reference here: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/59383276/Soda-Fountain-Flow-Chart-1>.


End file.
